Recent years have seen a great increase in subscribers world-wide to mobile telephone networks and, through advances in technology and the addition of functionalities, cellular telephones have become personal, trusted devices. A result of this is that a mobile information society is developing, with personalised and localised services becoming increasingly more important. Such “Context-Aware” (CA) mobile telephones are used with low power, short range base stations in places like shopping malls or airports to provide location-specific information. This information might include information on nearby shops and restaurants, flight gate number and check-in time and so on. The user's CA terminal may be equipped to filter the information received according to pre-stored user preferences and the user is only alerted if an item of data of particular interest has been received.
However, the “Pushing” (unsolicited delivery) of information over RF, IR or wide-area networks to mobile phone or PDA devices requires prior consent and optionally further selection through profiling for it to be accepted by (or acceptable to) consumers. Unsolicited, ‘junk’ alerts and offers will quickly be rejected.
The consent process itself, however, involving interaction with a central system, either beforehand or at the place where the push is to be delivered, and selection, plus a declaration of the user's handset identity, may entail prohibitive effort on the part of the casual user. Alternatively, filters may be activated by the user on their handset to block unwanted categories of pushed electronic offers. This may require user deliberations and effort to select the right personal filters for the place they are entering. An inefficient system may result which generates pushed offers and signals that are destined to be blocked by all of the users who are present in the locale.
A system which addresses the aforementioned problem of unsolicited push is described in the commonly assigned United Kingdom patent application no. 0113629.0 entitled ‘Consensual Data Delivery Through Beacons’ (Agents Ref. PHGB010086) filed Jun. 5, 2001 and unpublished at the priority date of the present application. The system provides a communications system comprising first and second beacon devices capable of wireless message transmission and at least one portable device capable of receiving such message transmissions, wherein said first beacon is arranged to broadcast a series of inquiry messages over a first broadcast range and according to a first communications protocol, wherein said at least one portable device is arranged to detect such inquiry messages when within said first broadcast range and reply with an identifier for the portable device, wherein said first beacon device is arranged to transmit a received identifier to said second beacon, wherein said second beacon and portable device are configured to perform a service interaction when the portable device is within a second broadcast range of the second beacon and when triggered by the second beacon receiving the portable device identifier, and wherein at least one of the first and second broadcast ranges is a relatively short broadcast range.
This system has the advantage that at least one of the beacons has a short broadcast range, necessitating the physical movement of a user towards a beacon to register their portable device for data delivery, thereby providing some user control over the “Push” process. However, the beacon broadcast range, although short in comparison with other broadcast ranges, is unconstrained and may therefore overlap with other beacons installed into the system at a later date, the latter also offering service interaction thereby leading to unwanted service delivery. Additionally, the lack of physical indication of the broadcast range can lead to confusion for the user, who may be unsure of not only where the beacons are, but also unsure of the required proximity required between their portable device and a beacon in order to enable service interaction.